Donors Find Much Somali Aid Stolen

By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO,

Published: February 9, 1993

GORSENE, Somalia, Feb. 4—
The scene awaiting relief workers was galling yet familiar. A courtyard that should have been in use as a feeding kitchen was covered with animal waste, with no caldron in sight; the self-appointed elders demanded salaries to haul water they said was six miles away, though the village had a dam and two working wells.

Five days earlier, the Red Cross had given Gorsene's elders a 10-day supply of food for the kitchen that ended up being sold at the market in Baidoa. The relief organization CARE had delivered hundreds of sacks of wheat to Gorsene, and Goal, an Irish charity, had brought porridge, oil, milk, butter, biscuits, blankets and sugar.

Only the tasteless porridge, which has no value in Somalia's marketplaces, reached the village's hungry families.

"The Red Cross sends us 200 sacks of rice, and 180 go to the market," Bareh Hussein Hassan, a farmer, told Thomas Niederle, a Red Cross worker who had come to check on whether the kitchen was operating. Mr. Hussein Hassan impatiently waved a hand toward a group of elders gathered nearby. "We never receive any food. They have very deep pockets."

The price the elders sell the donated rice is very low -- $8 for a 110 pound sack. But even this price is out of sight for people like Mr. Hussein Hassan who rarely has any money these days.

As the famine and fighting that have killed more than 300,000 Somalis subsides, relief officials are taking a closer look at the terms set by elders and factional leaders to assure delivery of aid. They are renegotiating agreements that bordered on extortion and addressing the worst cases of corruption, like the diversion of hundreds of sacks of dry food intended for the hungry.

In villages like Gorsene, some aid groups are only now discovering that other agencies have also been providing help, meaning that more was delivered than may have been needed.

"In the beginning, there were people dying everywhere in Baidoa," said Paul Oberson, head of the Red Cross operation in Baidoa. "The most important thing was to get food to them. We couldn't stop to worry about how much of it was being taken off the top."

While most aid workers agree that some stealing is inevitable in relief operations, the level of corruption here goes beyond mere skimming. In the worst cases, leaders leave only the dregs for their people.

Aid workers say the only recourse left is to flood the market with relief supplies so that everything from food to cooking pots, to blankets, loses value on the open market and becomes less attractive to looters.

Leaders whose villages lie on the road to far-flung pockets of hunger have demanded food as a kind of road toll for safe passage. And elders in villages like Gorsene, a dusty outpost some 20 miles southwest of Baidoa, usually demand a hefty share of any food or supplies provided to displaced people who come here, relief workers said. There are five camps in Gorsene for such refugees.

"The displaced get the worst of everything," said Mary Corbett, an aid worker in Goal's office in Baidoa. The Irish aid group has been running a feeding kitchen and clinic at Gorsene since September, she said, but only recently learned that the Red Cross has been delivering food to the village since Aug. 20.

At another village on the road from Baidoa to Gorsene, Iliyu Mumin, elders told relief workers that 600 of 900 sacks of wheat had been looted on the road from Baidoa, Ms. Corbett said.

"I checked their storeroom and saw sacks of wheat they were trying to sell," she said. "They told me they bought it at the market."

Some foreign relief workers find the looting by local leaders deeply disturbing. "They're doing it to their own people," Ms. Corbett said, shaking her head. "That's the worst of it."

A Red Cross official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Somali kitchen workers in one town had gone on strike at the height of the famine with demands for higher pay.

"I said, 'But people are dying,' " the relief official recounted. The official said the workers had replied: "That's your problem. I'm doing work. I want to get paid." The agency granted their wage demands, the relief official said.

Ali Mussa Abdi, a Somali journalist, asserts that the looting would not necessarily be considered shameful in his family.

"In our tradition, if your grandfather looted 100 camels, he was a big hero," Mr. Mussa Abdi said. "And if you didn't, people would look at you and say, 'What have you done with your life?' "

But many Somalis, like the farmer who spoke up at Gorsene, appear disgusted if not shocked by the stealing and are finally defying the rule of the gun. When Mr. Hussein Hassan criticized the elders, they laughed, but with embarrassment.

"Do not listen to these men," said Mohammed Abdi Rahman Ahmed, the village chief. "I am the leader."

Other villagers joined in denouncing the plunder. "When the Red Cross sent us food, all of it went back to Baidoa for sale," said Hassan Isak Mohammed, another farmer in Gorsene. Asked who had appointed the panel of elders to represent the village, Mr. Isak Mohammed flexed his biceps.

Before the arrival of thousands of foreign troops in December on a mission to protect food convoys from gunmen, the farmers had little choice but to accept the authority of the armed, self-appointed elders. Now, Mr. Hassan Hussein said, "we will try to elect somebody else."

Some aid agencies that ceded to exorbitant demands for money in return for escorts and helpers in the more dangerous days are considering reducing the vast numbers of local people they were required to hire.

Doctors Without Borders, a medical charity, employs 14 foreign doctors and 300 local support staff in Baidoa, said Peter Rykelykhuizen, its coordinator in the town. The Red Cross operation there includes a staff of nine foreigners who rely on 300 local people for support -- mostly security, maintenance, driving and housekeeping services, Mr. Oberson said.

"Before, every decision was made at the barrel of a gun," said Jane Black, spokeswoman for the Care office. "Now, we're beginning to have a say. Now, we're able to bring the prices down, and even to sack people.'

Other relief officials, including Mr. Oberson, describe the bloated staffs and payoffs as another form of aid, one they hope will eventually restore some life to Somalia's economy.

Since the starvation has generally subsided, those officials reason, why not allow local leaders to trade? In a healthy economy, they argue, traders would be buying from suppliers and selling on the market.

But experts agree that such practices sap the economy in the long term. Even officials who do not recoil at the prospect of maintaining big staffs or at the rampant diversion of food concede that flooding the market with free grain will prove devastating to Somalia's farmers, who are struggling to recover from the ravages of drought and civil war.

A 100-pound sack of rice now fetches only about 20,000 Somali shillings -- or about $5 -- on the open market.

Photo: Somali police officers and Italian soldiers beat back a crowd pushing to get food at a center near Mogadishu. (Reuters) Map of Somalia showing location of Gorsene